Parth Modi completed his M.S. in Biological Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech in 2020 and is currently a Doctoral Research Assistant in the Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has several experiences in land surface modeling (VIC, Noah-MP, National Water Model) and has worked on projects understanding the impacts of climate change on mesoscale hydrological processes and risk assessment of natural hazards including droughts and floods.
Kaitlyn is pursuing her PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder with a focus in Hydrology, Water Resources, and Environmental Fluid Mechanics. In 2021, she graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Environmental Engineering from The University of Alabama. Her previous experience spans many disciplines, including civil engineering site design, natural hazards research, and the application of engineering principles to public policy development.
We present a new REmotely Sensed ENsemble of the water cycle (REESEN). The REESEN approach generates a large number of realizations of the remotely sensed water budget and enforces closure for each realization. The REESEN approach is applied to 24 large river basins from Oct. 2002- Dec. 2014. Three water balance closure algorithms are evaluated, ranging from simple redistribution of residuals to more complex Kalman-filtering and multiple-collocation approaches, to understand the impact of algorithm choice on the resulting water budget partitioning.
This is an observationally-based dataset of soil evaporation for the conterminous U.S. (CONUS), gridded to a 9 km resolution for the time-period of April 2015-March 2019. This product (Evaporation-Soil Moisture Active Passive; E-SMAP) represents soil evaporation from the surface layer, defined by the SMAP sensing depth of 50 mm, during SMAP overpass intervals that are screened using precipitation and SMAP quality control flags. Soil evaporation is calculated through an estimated water balance of the surface soil, which we show is largely dominated by SMAP-observed soil drying.
Nels Bjarke is post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the Western Water Assessment and CIRES. His primary research encompasses evaluating drought of all forms across North America and the sensitivity of the classification of drought to the non-stationarity of the climate. Nels utilizes multiple streams of hydroclimate data to build tools and datasets that improve our understanding of how climate change has historically and will continue to impact surface water availability. Nels has a M.S. in Earth and Planetary Science from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D.
Michelle O’Donnell is a Master’s candidate in Civil Engineering. She graduated from Northeastern University in 2016 with a BS in Environmental Science. While working towards her degree, she worked for the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration in the River Instream Flow Stewards program, USGS in the New England Water Science Center, and in the Coastal Systems Group at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Carli’s research aims to quantify post-wildfire hydrologic and water quality effects in the U.S. West. Her most recent work focused on a regional-scale analysis of water quality constituent response after wildfires using statistical and machine-learning techniques. Her previous work includes designing and constructing laboratory-scale wildfire and rainfall simulation experiments, as well as publishing an extensive review on the state-of-the-art.
Estimating Western US Reservoir Sedimentation
Stress on global water resources is expected to increase in the coming decades making reservoir operations critical for sustainable water management. Reservoir sedimentation is a long-term challenge for water management across the western U.S. since it reduces available storage. Sedimentation observations are limited to reservoir surveys that are costly and infrequent, with many reservoirs having two or fewer surveys spanning decades. In most cases, sediment is assumed to accumulate at a constant rate through time.
Simulation of Montane Snowpacks for the Preservation of the Wolverine (Gulo gulo luscus) in the Western U.S.
A major gap in research on the future of snowpack in the western United States is accounting for snow persistence in relation to topographical effects like terrain aspect and slope, which have important consequences for species that rely on snow for habitat in alpine regions, such as the wolverine (Gulo gulo). Previous work has shown a predicted loss of snow-covered area in Montana (which encompasses much of the Wolverine’s extent range) ranging from 50 – 85%.
Assessing the Impacts of Wildfire on Sedimentation and Runoff in the Colorado Front Range
The complex effects of wildfire disturbances on the quality and availability of water are far-reaching and often difficult to anticipate, thus proving a challenge for prediction. Many studies have documented wildfire on either continental or hillslope scales, yet most critically overlook the interaction of local-scale processes across entire watersheds following a fire disturbance.